Urban Garden.13

So these potted plants sit on the balcony off the room where I meditate and do my workouts / yoga. The way these flowers suddenly appear on them is really a bit different from what I’m used to from the climate zones where I grew up, in which one has buds for a long time and eagerly waits for them to open – particularly, say, in the case of the spring bulbs like tulips or daffodils, eh? Here, one day I suddenly notice a new spike, and the next day voila, there’s a flower. The more unfolded flower-stalk here was featured previously in https://somuchworldsolittletime.wordpress.com/2020/05/27/urban-garden-6/ , and this week I noticed the second stalk, so thought I’d share with you its evolution.

By the way, online research tells me this is a variety of heliconia, which is not the flower commonly known as Bird of Paradise — for that one, do a quick search for Strelitzia. I once inherited a potted bird-of-paradise plant and, with careful application of the right fertilizers, encouraged it to bloom on a balcony in Brooklyn, long ago and far away :-). (Unlike my British friends, I cannot refer to plants in containers as pot plants. We in the US understand pot plants to be something quite entirely different from these lovely but not … pharmacopially useful? … heliconia.)